Statement on the 40th Anniversary of the Disappearance of Swedish Diplomat Raoul Wallenberg

January 17, 1985
Forty years ago today, a brave young man named Raoul Wallenberg disappeared from the streets
of war-torn Budapest. This young Swedish diplomat had been assigned to his country's legation in
Hungary in March 1944, where he undertook a humanitarian mission to save the lives of as many
Hungarian Jews as possible.

Heedless of personal danger, Wallenberg pulled people out of death marches, boarded deportation
trains, handed out Swedish papers to thousands of innocent people on the way to death camps
and insisted to the Nazi occupation authorities that anyone holding Swedish papers be released in
his custody. Altogether, Wallenberg is responsible for saving the lives of nearly 100,000 Jewish
men, women, and children from certain death in Nazi extermination camps. Some of the people
whom he saved are now prominent citizens of our own country.

On January 17, 1945, Raoul Wallenberg was taken by Soviet soldiers to the Provisional
Hungarian Government in southern Hungary, ostensibly to discuss relief efforts. He never
returned. It has been 40 years.

It is written in Holy Scriptures: ``Greater love hath no man than this, that a man lay down his life
for his friends.'' Raoul Wallenberg's friends were any and all who suffered injustice. Each day he
willingly jeopardized his own life so that others might live. In the face of horror and evil, this
noble young man stood tall and unflinching.

In 1981, as a reflection of the debt of gratitude which all Americans owe to Raoul Wallenberg, I
signed into law legislation making him an honorary United States citizen. He is the only
non-American, other than Winston Churchill, ever to be honored in this way. To be true to our
own values, this was the least that we -- as Americans -- could do to underscore our unbounded
admiration for Wallenberg's courage and dedication to humanity and the abhorrence with which
we view his unjust and illegal imprisonment by the Soviet Government.

The U.S. Government has repeatedly raised Raoul Wallenberg's case with the Soviet Government,
and has requested a full and satisfactory clarification of his fate. But the only Soviet explanation
of Wallenberg's fate was a statement in 1957 that he died 10 years earlier in a Soviet prison. No
explanation has been given of the circumstances of his arrest and subsequent disappearance.
Furthermore, over the years, there have been numerous reports from survivors of the Gulag that
Wallenberg may be alive.

In the depths of the horrors of World War II, Raoul Wallenberg was one shining light of
inspiration, upholding the honor of the human race. The world owes a tremendous and eternal
debt to this great man. And the Soviet Union owes the world a full and complete accounting of
his fate.